Oct

31

A few of my PCs don't have Microsoft's Powerpoint installed. I looked at buying it, but it's not particularly cheap, so I tried downloading OpenOffice , which is an open-source office suite.

In short, OpenOffice, and specifically "Impress", the OpenOffice alternative to Powerpoint, is great. A Powerpoint user will have no problems using it without any special instructions. I can't think of any useful feature that it doesn't have. It also has one big advantage over Powerpoint: you have the option of exporting your presentation to pdf, even if you don't own Adobe Acrobat. You can also export and open files in .ppt format, so a Powerpoint user can open and edit your files. I wonder why everyone doesn't just totally switch over to OpenOffice.

Troy Torrison adds:

Another presentation alternative is Apple's Keynote . If you’ve ever seen Steve Jobs give one of his presentations, you’ve seen Keynote in action. It’s reasonably priced (comes bundled with the Apple iWork suite) and quite powerful. Best of all, its built-in templates sport tasteful typography.